Byung Kyu Park's Personal Website

Here’s an interesting tidbit from Rasmussen today:

Forty-eight percent (48%) of voters nationwide now expect their own taxes to go up during the Obama years. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just nine percent (9%) expect their own taxes to go down.

Given how many people pay no income tax (I’ve heard figures around half, which is why it’s so easy to get support for increasing income tax: the half that do not pay tax vote to increase the tax on the other half that do!), it’s … interesting that so many people expect their tax to go up.

Granted, Rasmussen polls likely voters, not all adults or even registered voters, which probably means higher percentage of people polled by Rasmussen is likely to be paying tax, compared to the general population. But, even so, even the people in the lowest income bracket must be expecting some sort of tax increase to get that sort of poll results.

Well, let’s just hope that they are wrong. Or that they were thinking of increased taxes like cigarette tax (raised earlier this year) or that they have in mind things like VAT that Pelosi and her minions are thinking of (um, not that VAT is any better than increased income tax).

This is why I follow polls:

Is Daylight Savings Time worth the hassle? Forty-seven percent (47%) of adults say yes. That’s down slightly from early March when this year’s Daylight Savings Times began but is fairly consistent with previous years. Forty percent (40%) say it’s not worth the hassle, and 12% aren’t sure.

I guess this explains why we haven’t repealed the daylight savings time yet, despite all the academic and elitist snobbery about how daylight savings time was for WWII (we won, right?) and how it is unnecessary and it hurts agriculture than helps.

Well, all of that may be true, but the fact is, I suppose, daylight savings time is part of American culture, and at least as the polls stand today, it’s here to stay. Maybe in 10 years the opinions will shift, but that’s then.

This is just amazing:

Most voters trust themselves more than either Congress or President Obama when it comes to the economy, but they have way more confidence in themselves when it comes to the news media.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 85% of U.S. voters trust their own judgment more than the average reporter when it comes to the important issues affecting the nation. Only four percent (4%) trust the average reporter more. Eleven percent (11%) aren’t sure.

To me, this says two things: (1) Despite all the slander and misinformation spread by the media, Americans are not stupid—they know when someone is trying to push and nudge them in a direction they don’t want to go, and they resent it; (2) This is how a once respectable profession gets destroyed—through politicization and injection of overt bias in what is supposed to be professional work.

The collapse of mainstream journalism is something scientists should take notice from—it could happen to us. Some scientists think they know better than the John Q. Public. They think that they need “scare” the public into action, “for their own good.” They think they need to misrepresent their own work (you know, tweak a point here, hide some data there, to make, e.g. global warming seem more dire than it actually is, etc. etc.) so that the public will be duped into doing the “right thing”.

They are playing with fire, and its their reputation and credibility that’s going to burn, much as that of journalists has.

At least for the moment, the public trusts scientists in generic terms. Perhaps they take a step back on specific issues such as evolution or global warming, but in general, when a scientist speaks, they listen and trust. This should be more a note of caution than jubilee and abandon, for with great trust comes great responsibility—not to betray that trust.

But will scientists listen to this warning (I’m sure others have said this many times; at least Prof. Muller said a similar version at the colloquium earlier this semester), or will their ego make them hear without listening?

And a Rasmussen poll finds that a plurality of American voters agree with me:

Forty-eight percent (48%) of Americans nationwide believe that it is the responsibility of American Muslims to speak out against terrorist attacks on the United States.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 27% do not think American Muslims have that responsibility. Twenty-six percent (26%) of adults are not sure.

To the degree that some terrorists (I am not talking about Ireland here) claim to be adherents of the Muslim faith, those who do follow the teachings of Muhammad need to speak against and absolutely condemn those who besmirch their faith with senseless violence—that is, if Muslim indeed is a religion of peace.

In an ideal society, no man would need to speak for or against another man’s action. After all, each individual is independent and has no obligation—beyond what is specified in a contract—with regard to another man’s action. But, we don’t live in an ideal, free society, and instead, we live in a collectivist one, where identifications are made by group of people sharing same religion, ethnicity, profession, etc. As long as we live in a collectivist society, the group has a responsibility to police and condemn its own members when they sin—such as by suicide bombing a train.

And this is the exact way I feel when some naturalized American citizen commits treason against this country, most commonly by espionage or illegal munitions export. I am positively outraged when that happens and only the constitutional clause regarding due process stops me from suggesting that we just lynch the guy.

Can anyone tell me that American Muslims don’t feel the same way when Muslim terrorists attack America?